Regional Environmental Inequality In China And Its Influencing Mechanism

In1980s, the environmental equity movement in North Carolina makes peopleaware of environmental inequalities between different groups. Since then, extensiveacademic research began to analyze environmental inequality issues and expand theresearch range from different groups to different regions. In comparison, environmentalinequality issues in China have not got enough academic or political attention. The highinput and energy consumption of industry in China results in low energy utilizationefficiency and destruction of the ecological environment. With increasingly seriousenvironmental pollution, energy conservation is imperative. However, reducingemissions means the possible reduction of economic benefits and increased pollutionabatement costs. Allocation of emission reduction is related to the benefits amongdifferent regions. In order to arrange a reasonable reduction task, it is necessary to takeaccount of the inequalities characteristics of regional development and pollutionemissions. Moreover, as the final bearers of environmental pollution, social membershave to face different environmental risk brought by regional environmental inequality,while the aggregation of environmental inequality would breed environmental inequity.Therefore, research on regional environmental inequality is the basis of analyzingenvironmental inequality between different groups and environmental inequity. Basedon systematic literature review of environmental inequality and inequality measurementtheory, this paper applies different indexes to measure and decompose regionalenvironmental inequality in China, studies the contribution of relative factors toenvironmental inequality, and also measures the regional environmental governanceefficiency to analyze the influence of government environmental regulation on regionalenvironmental inequality.Firstly, unlike the per capita pollution emission （emission density） data inprevious studies, this paper applies emission data of per unit industrial output-emissionintensity, to measure and decompose the regional environmental inequality in1997-2011from “provincial” level and “eastern, central, western” region level, byusing the Gini index, Theil T index and Theil L index. The results show that from theperspective of both levels, the environmental inequalities among different regions areobvious. The regional inequality degree of industrial solid waste emissions is thehighest, followed by industrial waste gas and industrial waste water. From1997-2011, the trend of regional inequalities of industrial wastewater and waste gas emission showinverted U shape process, and the trend of regional inequalities of industrial solid wasteshow N form. Environmental inequality within developed region is much higher thanthat within less developed regions. Regional environmental inequality in China ismainly from the internal emission difference within regions, and the internal inequalityof regions is mainly from differences within the eastern area, which shows that affectedby the economic development and industrialization process, the industrial pollutionemission differences within east region is most obvious.On the basis of measurement of regional environmental inequality, the paperconducts empirical study to test the EKC hypothesis in China by using provincial andregional panel data from1997-2011and the analysis on the classical IPAT framework ofenvironmental impact, Grossman decomposition model and Verbeke and Clercq model.Then, it determines the equations of factors affecting the industrial pollution emissionsintensity under different perspectives. On this basis, it uses Shapley valuedecomposition method based on the regression equation to decompose the regionalenvironmental inequality. The results show that, firstly, whether it is from theperspective of provincial or regional level, there is a U shape curve instead of invertedU shape curve between the emission intensity of industrial pollution and economicgrowth, but there is rarely province reaching the economic development inflection point.Secondly, by adopting fixed-effects panel data model, random effects and feasiblegeneralized least squares method （FGLS） to estimate the factor affecting industrialpollution emissions intensity, the results show on both provincial and sub-regional level,there are significant negative effect respectively between economic development,industrial structure, urbanization rate, foreign direct investment and industrial pollutionemission intensity. The role of economic development is the most significant, andtherefore it is the most important factor to industrial pollution emission intensity. Theeconomic dependence on foreign trade is positively associated with industrial pollutionemission intensity, but its effect is not significant. Third, the decisive factor for theregional environmental inequality is economic development, and as time goes by, itscontribution to regional environmental inequality is increasingly significant. Industrialstructure, urbanization rate and foreign direct investment are the second-tier factors, andthe influence of economic dependence on foreign trade is minimal. In fact, theestimation results of factor equations show, both from provincial or regional perspective, economic dependence on foreign trade is not a significant factor, this is correspondingto the decomposition results.Finally, based on the three-stage DEA method and geographical variables, thepaper measures the environmental pollution control efficiency in China from2004-2011.Then, it analyzes environmental pollution control efficiency and the differences fromeastern to central and western regions, in order to further investigate the effect ofenvironmental governance on regional environmental inequality. The results show, theenvironmental pollution control efficiencies of the eastern region are relatively stablebut the highest, but only achieving optimal efficiency frontier in2004. In the entireperiod, the environmental pollution control efficiencies of central and western regionsare all invalid and significantly lower than that of eastern region. Besides, theefficiencies change with a downward trend. It is found that after efficiencydecomposition, before2008the higher level of environmental pollution controlefficiency in eastern region is due to contribution of pure technical efficiency, later isdue to contribution of scale efficiency. Low pure technical efficiency and scaleefficiency of central region are the key factors restricting further improvement of itspollution control efficiencies. Pure technical efficiency reflects the main pollutioncontrol difference between eastern and central region, while the western region isconstrained by lack of input, low pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency. Thus,the long-term effect of regional environmental pollution control efficiency differencesas well as the cumulative effect, result in a gradual expansion of China’s environmentalgovernance differences, and this effect to some extent deepens the disadvantages ofwestern region, further consolidating the environmental inequalities inter-regions.